From a pit village the vicar’s wife writes:—
The women are so terribly tempted by the men who come round to their doors.
But possibly the following story, related by a navvy, may serve better than numerous examples to exhibit the real inwardness of the betting habit when it attacks the home through the housewife:—
I have my health and strength [he said], and I have always plenty of work; the job I’m on now will last another six months. It’s true I have seven children, but I make no trouble of working for their support. We used to go to church when we was first married, my wife and I; we lived at Southampton then, and we both thought a deal of Canon Wilberforce. It was him that tied the knot. Since we came North I have not gone to any church: wife was taken up with the children. But I always washed myself, and put on my Sunday suit when Sunday came round; sometimes I’d take the kids for a bit of a walk into the country, and sometimes I’d take a stroll round with a few of my mates. Anyways I held up my head straight and thought I was as good as any—my meaning is that I thought I had the right to look any one in the face, for I believed till a week ago that I did not owe any one a penny piece. It was Saturday even, and up comes to me a bailiff chap, but I did not know then that he was a bailiff; he shoves a paper into my hand, and I reads on it “Judgment Summons. Personally served on the Defendant,” and there below I sees my name written in. I said, “Take it away, I never have aught to do with such things.” I had to take it in, and I found it was an order for £1: 2: 3, that should have been paid long before to a firm called a “Clothing Company,” trading from a town twenty miles away. Not half a dozen words did I say to any one that day, just sits dumb and dazed over the fire; not a wink did I sleep, but by Sunday morn breakfast was over I’d my plans made.
I gets a bit of lead pencil from one of the lads, turns the children out of the room, spreads out a piece of paper, and sits myself down. Then I says to the wife, “My lass, I never have chastised thee, never; but now thou hast just got to bring me every bill and every pawn-ticket, and thou hast just got to think on, and to tell me of every penny I owe, and if I find thou hast kept aught back, I shall feel fit to take off my belt and to thrash thee with it to within an inch of thy life, and if I have to go to gaol for it, I’ll go.”
By tea-time that Sunday I’d got that paper about covered with figures, and reckoned up it come to £70. There were two doctors’ bills, four coal-cart men, there were three lots of goods from the “Clothing Company,” and four from the “Furnishing Company,” and both these I were told firms of peddling fellows whom I had never seen, because they are such curs they never show their face at a door when the master’s in, and when they have sold their goods (all on the weekly payment system) to silly women, they go off home by train, so as the husbands can’t follow them home and give them the horsewhipping they deserve.
I found a deal of things that Lord’s Day. I went up to look at the children’s beds and saw the blankets was gone off them, I looks in the drawers and found them empty where they should have been full of children’s clothing and bedding. I understood that day why the two eldest girls were so long getting themselves places; they had naught but what they stood up in. Folks might say I should have looked into things a bit sooner, but I were one that always said, “If the man earned the money and turned it over to the wife, it were the wife’s place to lay it out to advantage.”
We had not been living in that house above a twelvemonth, but it all come about since we’d moved in. I could see nothing wrong with the street when we took the house; it looked quiet enough. It had not been built so long; the house was clean and airy, and there was an extra room for the lads, that were the chiefest thing we moved for.
How was I to know, when nobody telled me, that the women in this was all a-cheating their husbands, and was just one a bigger gambler than another.